Authors:
Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 8
The Robber Baronesses
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Today, there are few areas of human activity where women are still absent. The nation’s most populous state has sent two to the United States Senate, where they sit with six others. The Supreme Court has two female justices. All four branches of the armed services now have female combat pilots. And a woman not only managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole of British politics in recent decades, she utterly dominated it for 11 years.
But the next time there is a busy day on Wall Street, take a close look at the inevitable television pictures of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Except for the electronics, it might still be the 1920s, for the floor remains a masculine preserve.
And while women are increasingly present behind the scenes on Wall Street these days, the Street was probably the last major area of the American economy to have women move into positions of real power. It was only in 1967, after all, that a woman first held a seat on the Exchange.
Imagine, then, the public reaction when two women decided to open a Wall Street brokerage house of their own not in 1967 but in 1870, a full half-century before women were even guaranteed the right to vote. As you might expect, these were no ordinary women; they were Victoria Woodhull and her younger sister, Tennessee Claflin, two only-in-America originals. An interesting biography of Victoria Woodhull, The Woman Who Ran for President, by Lois Beachy Underbill, appeared earlier this year.
Victoria Woodhull was born in 1838 and was named for the queen who had ascended the British throne the previous year. Her father, Buck Claflin, was a jack-of-all-trades, always looking for the main chance and the fast buck and never finding it. A devoted entrepreneur, he lacked the ability, and the honesty, to make a success of anything for very long. He would spend much of his life one jump ahead of the sheriff.
Victoria’s mother, from Pennsylvania German stock, could not read but had memorized long passages of the Bible from having heard them recited. She was deeply religious and was caught up in the great religious revival that began about the time of Victoria’s birth.
Mrs. Claflin often took Victoria to religious meetings where the girl witnessed many, including her own mother, in the throes of religious ecstasy. But the woman was a sloppy housekeeper at best and an erratic mother to her nine quarrelsome children. Indeed, the Claflin family was a good example of what the French ethologist Jean-Jacques Petter called a “noyau,” a social community held together by internal antagonism.
Victoria Woodhull would take the family traits of humbug, spirituality, and argumentativeness and—with a touch of genius and a generous helping of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s money—turn them into immortality.
Victoria married Canning Woodhull when she was only fifteen. He had seemed like a catch, a doctor who came from